Mr. Punch's History of Modern England (Vol. 1-4). Charles L. Graves
I must to the workhouse go,
If better may not be;
Ay, if, indeed! The workhouse! No!
The gaol—the gaol for me.
There shall I get the larger crust,
The warmer house-room there;
And choose a prison since I must,
I'll choose it for its fare.
The dog will snatch the biggest bone,
So much the wiser he:
Call me a dog—the name I'll own—
The gaol—the gaol for me.
The horror of the "Union" inspired some of the most moving pages in Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" some twenty years later. How deep and well justified it was in the 'forties may be gathered from the scandal of the Andover Union workhouse in '45, the habitual underfeeding of paupers, and the frequent inquests at which verdicts of "natural death" were returned on victims of neglect and even cruelty. The opposition to the humane proposal to establish a lending library at the Greenwich workhouse, following the example of Wandsworth, moved Punch to indignant irony: "Food for a pauper's mind, indeed! It is quite enough to have to find food for his body." In 1851 an inquiry into the management of a workhouse near Leeds revealed that the inmates were fed at a trough, six at a time. In 1857 the workhouse children at Bath were not allowed to see the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk. Owing to the intervention of the Guardians, headed by a clergyman, the children were actually stopped at the door of the theatre. But in "Dust from a Bath-brick" Punch dusted the jackets of the Guardians in his best style. Again and again we find him protesting against the regulation of the new Poor Law which separated man and wife directly they entered the workhouse. For professional mendicants he had no sympathy. Witness the ironical lines on "The Jolly London Beggars":—
A fig for honest occupation,
Beggary's an easier trade;
Industry is mere starvation,
Mendicancy's better paid.
Bigamy or Divorce?
In the long campaign for the reform of the Marriage Laws Punch never ceased to reiterate his conviction that cheap divorce was a better remedy than the punishment of the brutal husband. Yet when Mr. Justice Maule delivered his historic judgment in 1845, Punch hardly rendered justice to that masterpiece of fruitful irony:—
WAGGERY OF THE BENCH
One Thomas Rollins, as poor as beggary, was arraigned as a bigamist. His first wife had left him and become no better than one of the wicked. Whereupon Rollins took another helpmate; and, for such violation of the law, found himself face to face with Justice Maule, who, as it will appear, happened to be in one of his pleasantest humours. He told the culprit, and we doubt not with a gravity of face worthy of the original Billy Lackaday, "that the law was the same for him as it was for a rich man, and was equally open for him, through its aid, to afford relief." In the like way that turbot and champagne are the same to Lazarus as to Dives; if Lazarus could only buy the taste of them. Beggar and rich man have both the same papillary organs—a dignifying truth for the outcast wanting a dinner! However, the droll Judge continued his pleasantry:
"He (Rollins) should have brought an action against the man who was living in the way stated with his wife, and he should have obtained damages, and then should have gone to the Ecclesiastical Court and obtained a divorce, which would have done what seemed to have been done already, and then he should have gone to the House of Lords, and, proving all his case and the preliminary proceedings, have obtained a full and complete divorce; after which he might, if he liked it, have married again."
There is a delicious vein of humour in this. It smacks of the grave, earnest fun of Swift. How the jest increases in volume as we follow the pauper from court to court—tarry with him awhile in the House of Lords—and finally see him "married again." And then the Judge, in a sustained spirit of drollery, observes:
"The prisoner might perhaps object to this, that he had not the money to pay the expenses, which would amount to about £500 or £600—perhaps he had not so many pence—but this did not exempt him from paying the penalty for committing a felony, of which he had been convicted."
Of course not. Therefore Thomas Rollins is in effect not punished for marrying a second wife, but for the turpitude of wanting "about £500 or £600," by means of which he might have rid himself of his first spouse. In England the bonds of Hymen are only to be cut with a golden axe. Assuredly there needs a slight alteration in the marriage service. "Whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder," should be followed by these words, "Unless paid about £500 or £600 to separate them."
Punch, we are afraid, was inclined, in those days at any rate, to resent any attempt to usurp his functions as a public ironist, even by those who were fighting on the same side as himself. Anyhow, he omitted to mention that the judge sentenced Rollins to one day's imprisonment. But later references to this famous judgment made it clear that Punch recognized that the judge's irony was deliberate and animated by a sincere desire for reform, not by mere irresponsible "waggery."
Against the Game Laws and their administration Punch waged a continuous war. Squires were condemned for the damage done to land by game kept up for the profit of the landlord, hares being fed at the expense of the tenant farmer. John Bull worshipped rank and money, and amongst his idols were hares, pheasants and partridges, with his "bold peasantry" as their constant victims.
The Model Labourer
The Hon. Grantley Fitzhardinge Berkeley, M.P., who published a pamphlet in 1845 defending the drastic treatment of poachers, was very roughly handled for his calm assertion of the sacred rights of game; but perhaps the most effective comment on the inequalities of life on the land is to be found in the ironical portrait of "The Model Labourer" in the summer of 1848:—
He supports a large family upon the smallest wages. He works from twelve to fourteen hours a day. He rises early to dig in what he calls his garden. He prefers his fireside to the alehouse, and has only one pipe when he gets home, and then to bed. He attends church regularly, with a clean smock frock and face, on Sundays, and waits outside, when service is over, to pull his hair to his landlord, or, in his absence, pays the same reverence to the steward. Beer and he are perfect strangers, rarely meeting, except at Christmas or harvest time; and as for spirits, he only knows them, like meat, by name. He does not care for skittles. He never loses a day's work by attending political meetings. Newspapers do not make him discontented, for the simple reason that he cannot read. He believes strongly in the fact of his belonging to the "Finest Peasantry." He sends his children to school somehow, and gives them the best boots and education he can. He attributes all blights, bad seasons, failures, losses, accidents to the repeal of the Corn Laws. He won't look at a hare, and imagines, in his respect for rabbits, that Jack Sheppard was a poacher. He whitewashes his cottage once a year. He is punctual with his rent, and somehow, by some rare secret best known by his wages, he is never ill. He knows absolutely nothing beyond the affairs of his parish, and does not trouble himself greatly about them. If he has a vote, it is his landlord's, of course. He joins in the cry of "Protection," wondering what it means, and puts his X most innocently to any farmer's petition. He subscribes a penny a week to a Burial Society. He erects triumphal arches, fills up a group of happy tenants, shouts, sings, dances—any mockery or absurdity, to please his master. He has an incurable horror of the Union, and his greatest pride is to starve sooner than to solicit parish relief. His children are taught the same creed. He prefers living with his wife to being separated from her. His only amusement is the Annual Agricultural Fat-and-Tallow Show; his greatest happiness if his master's pig, which he has fattened, gets the prize. He struggles on, existing rather than living, infinitely worse fed than the beasts he gets up for the exhibitions—much less cared about than the soil he cultivates; toiling without hope, spring, summer, autumn and winter, his wages never higher—frequently less—and perhaps after thirty years' unceasing labour, if he has been all that time with the same landlord, he gets the munificent